🚨 Texas Senate passes “Anti-CRT” bill that drops Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream" speech from the state’s social studies curriculum. news.bloomberglaw.com/social-justice…
It was just a matter of time before these “anti-CRT” bills started targeting MLK and Black History Month.
Remember that group of Democrats that flew out of the state? They are the reason this anti-MLK repeal bill can’t pass the Texas House.
The bill drops curriculum requirements to teach women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement in social studies classes.
MLK’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” would also be dropped along with Susan B. Anthony and Cesar Chavez.
The Texas Senate bill says teachers can only teach that “slavery and racism” are “deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to the authentic founding principals of the United States.”
The bill is even worse than the original reporting. TX Senate bill 3 is repeal of another anti-CRT bill, TX House bill 3979. The Senate version guts existing social studies standards.
They didn’t want you to see the strikethroughs.
Let’s compare and see what they removed.
What is being dropped from Texas social studies curriculum in the Senate bill?
📌 the history of Native Americans
📌 Sally Hemmings (enslaved by Thomas Jefferson)
📌 Oney Judge (enslaved by George Washington)
📌 Frederick Douglas’s North Star
📌 The Book of Negroes
📌 The Fugitive Slave Acts
📌 The Indian Removal Act
📌 Thomas Jefferson’s Letter to the Danbury Baptists
📌 William Still’s Underground Railroad Records
The Texas Senate also cut…
“Historical documents related to the civic accomplishments of marginalized populations, including documents related to:”
📌 The Chicano Movement
📌 Women’s Suffrage and Equal Rights
📌 The Civil Rights Movement
📌 The Snyder Act of 1924
…
The Texas Senate bill also dropped documents related to:
📌 The American Labor Movement
The newly passed Texas Senate anti-CRT bill drops requirements for students to learn the “history of white supremacy.”
Topics cut:
📌 Institution of Slavery
📌 Eugenics Movement
📌 Ku Klux Klan
📌 The Ways in Which White Supremacy is Morally Wrong
The Texas Senate anti-CRT bill dropped select documents of the civil rights movement:
📌 MLK’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
📌 MLK’s “I Have a Dream”
📌 Brown v. Board of Education
📌 The Emancipation Proclamation
📌 The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
📌 15th Amendment
More civil rights movement documents dropped from the social studies curriculum in the Texas Senate’s anti-CRT bill:
📌 Mendez v. Westminster
📌 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
📌 Life and Work of Cesar Chavez
📌 Life and Work of Dolores Huerta
All that specifically remains mandated in the Texas curriculum in this bill regarding civil rights are the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the 13th and 14th amendments.
The Texas Senate bill also drops mandated women’s suffrage topics:
📌 Voting Right Act of 1965
📌 15th & 26th Amendments
📌 “Remember the Ladies”
📌 Susan B. Anthony
📌 Declaration of Sentiments
📌 Dr. Hector P. Garcia
📌 American GI Forum
📌 LULAC
📌 Hernandez v. Texas
The above topics would no longer be mandated in Texas’s social studies curriculum under the Senate bill.
While not an outright ban, it might as well be, because these guidelines inform what is taught. Textbook companies write textbooks based on state standards.
Both the Texas Senate and House bills gag schools from mandating discussions on “a particular current event or widely debated and currently controversial issue…”
The bill requires teachers to “both sides” these issues “without giving deference to any one perspective.”
So basically the Texas Senate said the Texas House’s anti-CRT wasn’t racist enough and stripped away history that makes America look bad.
This betrays their understanding that teaching accurate history is a path to anti-racism, which is a threat to their power.
As Texas Republicans are censoring the historic contributions of Black people, Native Americans, and others, let’s remember MLK said racism tries to show that “one particular race is responsible for all of the progress, all of the insights, and the total flow of history.”
Longer clip… MLK acknowledging American society was widespread racist more than he realized even a decade ago.
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